So recently, I’ve been getting

So recently, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic to my Evolving Genesis experiment. I’ve taken to looking over my “Recent Referrers” list, trying to see where people are coming from, and what pages they’re looking at. Tracking the links back, I found quite a few discussons going on, on various sites.

Oddly, the comments are all over the place. Some folks like it, and think it’s neat. Other folks are going so far as to suggest that I added in some kind of check in the code, to prevent the sentence from ever appearing. Apparently, I’m not only a Creationist, but a Christian of dubious integrity as well?

For the record, here’s the blurb to the Evolving Genesis experiment:

In 2001, I came across a Scientific American article about a strange art piece/experiment by Joe Davis called the “Self-Assembling Clock.” Davis took apart a clock and placed the pieces inside a sealed Mason jar. According to the history books, “life supposedly arose spontaneously from colliding precursory biochemicals billions of years ago.” By that same logic the pieces inside the Mason jar should spontaneously combine to form a fully functioning clock.

In a similar spirit, “Evolving Genesis” is a simple test in randomization. This program generates letters (choosing from a, b, c, d, e, g, h, i, n, o, r, t, v, space, period) and attempts to create the first line of the Bible, Genesis 1:1. Any letters that match correctly show up as white; any letters that are matched incorrectly show up as green.

There is no real point to this, I guess. If anything, after watching this I hope you will appreciate the astronomical odds against our being here, our being alive right now.

If you are a diehard empiricist like me, perhaps this little statistical experiment comes closer to blurring the boundaries between the miraculous and the improbable.

Ah, well. At least people are talking to one another about their views of the world. That’s the important thing, right? Chalk this one up to my deciding to use the word “Evolution” instead of “Random.” Also, I need to go into the Flash and make that help button a bit more visible… I don’t think people are actually clicking on that guy. Because if they did… they’d realize what the experiment is all about.